A friend of mine, a linguist, has an acute way of addressing problems. We were discussing the dominance of Trump and Putin. He laughingly said ‘bully boys’ are conceptual problems and they need to be out-thought. To be trumped, Trump has to be out-thought. He did not add that he came upon the idea while working on Unesco as an institution.
He said that almost all the categories that we sanctified and legitimised in 1945 ring hollow today. He then added, “What’s worse is that the word ‘culture’ has become ironic. It has lost its playfulness. Its sense of plurality. A feeling for the unexpected.”
He gave me a strange example of why that’s important. He said the extinct dodo is today a much-maligned word. It is first the stuff of cartoons, then of zoology books. But a zoologist from New Zealand observed that along with the dodo, several species of trees had disappeared too. He realised there must be a connection. He saw footage of the dodo consuming some seeds and spitting the epidermis out with contempt. He raced out to feed the same seeds to the first turkey he could find. In a few weeks, the extinct plant was back.
The vocabulary of the official international relations sanctified in the Truman era—which includes nation-state, development, science and electoral democracy—lacked this playfulness. In the official sense, culture has become an impoverishing term.
He remarked that development, in that sense, is one of the most impoverished of concepts. Development has no sense of culture. In fact, it treats culture with contempt. One can see it in the way Trump or Modi engage with development. The Andaman becomes a place sans culture. For Trump, all areas are merely real estate to be developed without a sense of people. The illiteracy of development and its genocidal impact centre around culture.
And yet development surrounds itself with fancy concepts. One can see it in the Narmada Dam. The height of the dam was fundamental and yet one had to face the fact that every increase in height displaced a few acres of people. Cost benefit is culture. It is illiterate about the lifegiving nature of culture.
The nation-state is equally genocidal. Nationalism was a pluralistic entity. The Indian national movement embodies the sheer poetry of childhood—whether it was Gandhi, Geddes, Tagore, or Annie Besant. All celebrated the power of childhood in creating alternative childhoods.
The nation-state today, unlike the nation, is a formal entity more prone to regimentation. It allows for little fluidity. Probably, one of the biggest casualties of the nation-state is language. My friend remarked that Unesco has to be anti-national today to recover the sense of the vernacular. The vernacular and the regional have to be brought back. The ethnic has to be revived. Otherwise, the nation-state in its census is a mere bodycount of genocide. Official history is a mere legitimiser of genocide.
Science is equally problematic. One forgets that science has become a formal, standardising mode of cognition. It allows little space for eccentricity or dissent. My friend added that sometimes I miss scientists like Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. They offered fascinating hypotheses which pluralised the sciences. Sapir went on to suggest that many American Indian languages were close to quantum physics in their understanding of reality. The accuracy of this has been questioned, but the possibility of playing around with the idea is almost seductive.
In recent times, anthropologists have found that many American Indian cosmologies are not just mythical, they are epistemological. They tend to emphasise a different way of looking at reality. An anthropologist recently found that some American Indian tribes had a theory of trees as a network of roots and communication. One misses so much of what is exciting in ethnobotany in the way science treats the tribal. The tribal has to be seen as a scientist.
I remember a story my father told me. We were sitting in Jamshedpur one late evening. The sky was alight with the glow of slag pouring out of Tata Steel’s blast furnaces. In a few minutes, the forest in front was also ablaze with jhum cultivation. My father said, “As long as both survive, the tribal will survive.” He considered tribals to be his fellow metallurgists.
What I wish to emphasise is the idea of culture has lost its sense of cognition, playfulness and plurality. Culture has impoverished itself by officialising and turning into monoculture.
It is at this point that my friend pointed out that the dullest of cultural games today is democracy. As an electoral system, it has become an arid rules game. Foisting majoritarian governments on people, it leaves the marginals, the minority, the migrants little scope. Democracy, which was based on the ontology of citizenship, has disempowered the world. The citizen today is more a fragment of a refugee or a displaced person.
My friend said that as a linguist, he looked at democracy beyond electoralism and demography. He emphasised the need for cognitive democracy. A democracy with a penchant for plural systems, for alternative imaginations where the future remains playfully unpredictable.
The language of Trump and Putin show a terrifying, almost ideological predictability. They may be pompous, they may be spectacles, they may rule huge portions of the world. But they eventually make power into a boring entity. The four key concepts my friend emphasised, all sanctified during the Truman era—development, nation-state, science and electoral democracy—have all become de-culturing terms. Each is a prelude to genocide and each a preamble to erasure.
In this context, language has to become reinventive again. It is time Unesco returned to the time of poetry and manifestoes. We have to alter the content of the French slogan ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’. Fraternity is the weak term—it has little sense of tolerance. It has even less of the culture of differences.
Trump, as a bully boy, has to be defeated conceptually and poetically. Mere power is no longer enough. One needs the margins and migrants to offer a new language of politics. A new vernacular of dissent. A new poetics of democracy. The crudity of international politics can only be redeemed if culture as an idea redeems itself.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)